Dietrich & Riefenstahl: Hollywood, Berlin, and a Century in Two Lives

by Wieland, Karin

  In the film, high-school teacher Raat is feared by the pupils and disliked by the townspeople. He is an eccentric tyrant who lives alone with his bird and his books. When he discovers that his pupils have a flirtatious postcard of the singer Lola Lola, he decides to pay her a visit and give her a piece of his mind. Disoriented, he wanders around the harbor until he winds up at the Blue Angel nightclub. There a new world opens up to him, a world he does not understand and cannot decipher. Lola Lola turns out to be a lovely, self-assured young woman who unhesitatingly allows him into her dressing room and thus into her life. He now spends every evening with her, feeling important and privileged. Raat is socially inept, especially around women. He feels drawn to the strange performing troupe with whom Lola Lola travels, although it does not live up to any of his strict standards. The performers soon get used to him; after all, he is treating them to champagne and seems to adore Lola Lola. He is turning into a suitor without even realizing it. Lola Lola, for whom he represents a change of pace, enjoys dazzling him with her body, her voice, and her intimate accessories. Raat enters into an erotic relationship with the singer and undergoes a complete transformation in his late-blooming sensuality. He eventually marries Lola Lola, which makes the townspeople despise him. He goes off with Lola’s troupe, but many years later the troupe returns to the Blue Angel. Raat has deteriorated markedly; he is now an old, unkempt, ludicrous man playing a clown on the stage. His wife is still beautiful; she defends him the way she would a child, and assumes the traditionally masculine role of protecting him.

  The enterprising director announces him as Professor Raat, and the locals turn out to see what has become of him. Raat has to mount the stage in a clown costume, submit to having eggs cracked on his head, and crow like a rooster. The height of his humiliation is reached when he realizes that Lola Lola is cheating on him. He tries to strangle her, but is subdued; then, like a wounded animal, he creeps back to his old school and dies, slumped over his desk.

  The movie takes place from the years 1925 to 1929; the novel had been published back in 1905. In the novel, Professor Immanuel Raat remains in the city and wreaks revenge on the supposedly upstanding citizens in his city who drove him from his post. While Mann’s novel showed how an erotic encounter utterly transforms a representative of Wilhelmine culture, von Sternberg was barely interested in German history and utterly indifferent to social criticism. Well into the 1960s, von Sternberg’s critics on the left took issue with his having used this German setting without commenting on the situation in Germany. “I must be forgiven if I state once more that most of the story of the film and its details existed only in my imagination, that I knew very little about Germany before I began it, that then I had not yet seen anyone resembling a Nazi, and that the entire stimulation to make the film came from a book that was written by Heinrich Mann in the good old days before 1905.”86 Professor Raat scurries through the narrow streets in his wide, cape-like overcoat the way Dr. Caligari had many years earlier. The architecture in this movie, which was one of the first major sound films, recalls expressionist silent films. Von Sternberg used sound to intensify the images, but objects were all he needed to create a milieu or set a tone.87 Lola Lola and Raat are worlds apart not only in their clothing, behavior, and gender, but above all in the way they sound. He speaks a punctilious German, and she a sloppy Berlin dialect. His world is filled with quiet and books. The only sounds come from his pet bird and the glockenspiel of the town hall clock playing a tune from The Magic Flute, which runs through the movie like an acoustic leitmotif. Apart from Raat, everyone—including Lola Lola herself—knows that she is no artist.

  The Blue Angel premiered on April 1, 1930, at the Gloria Palace in Berlin. The government of the Social Democratic chancellor Hermann Müller had collapsed just days earlier. On March 30, Heinrich Brüning—a man who had nothing to offer the country but “poverty, the curtailment of liberty, and the assurance that there was no alternative,” as Sebastian Haffner wrote—was appointed chancellor.88 The end of the Weimar Republic was near. It is difficult to say whether Dietrich had any awareness of these developments. The previous months had been quite draining for her. She was continually assailed by doubts as to whether she had truly been qualified for the role. The period of waiting for the premiere was also a time of farewell to Berlin, Rudi, Maria, Willi Forst, friends, and her mother. The hardest part was leaving her child. Dietrich was unwilling to release anyone from her sphere of influence, least of all her daughter. “After long discussions, my husband and I finally decided that I would go to the United States alone. Our daughter would remain with him in Berlin until we could see what impression that strange country called America would make on me before we dared to ‘transplant’ our little Maria and her governess. I was sent out on a reconnaissance mission.”89 She knew that she was expected in Hollywood. Von Sternberg was longing for the woman he loved and desired and for the actress he could mold as he wished. Dietrich was also flummoxed by the question of what to wear to the premiere. She wished “Jo” (as she called von Sternberg) were with her; he would know what would show her off to her best advantage.

  Pencil drawings sketched on the night of the premiere show nervous policemen in their tall military hats, horse-drawn carriages stopping outside the theater, and people in festive garments charging into the brightly lit movie theater. Curious onlookers lined up out front. The high-priced tickets had been sold out for days. By 8 p.m., the lobby was full to overflowing. Many guests for the premiere had come in evening gowns, but there were also stylish cocktail dresses and simple dress suits. Dietrich had opted for ladylike fashion. If she was going to be playing such a crude woman onscreen, she would certainly want to shine as a sophisticated lady onstage. She wore a long, frilly white dress topped with a wide-collared white fur; white gloves; and a long, dark necklace. Her hair was parted and combed back. Everybody who was anybody in the world of Berlin cinema was in attendance, and the excitement ran high. An expectant silence filled the theater when the lights went down. Latecomers and noisy spectators were hissed at. Jannings made a point of standing at the buffet, sullenly sipping his coffee, while the movie was playing. Only at the final applause did he hurry onto the stage to join Dietrich. The two of them stood side by side, maintaining as much physical distance from each other as they could while holding hands. The rounds of applause were for both of them, but the triumph was for Dietrich alone. “Immediately following the premiere of the Jannings film The Blue Angel, Marlene Dietrich, Jannings’s partner, headed for the train station to travel on to Bremerhaven and from there to New York and Hollywood. A group of close friends and family and two photographers escorted her. The artist showed no signs of cheerfulness. . . . What will the future bring? Anything noteworthy apart from dollars? Marlene Dietrich does not seem to be cherishing very great hopes.”90 She stood at the open window of the train in her white dress with one bouquet of lilacs and another of roses in her arms. She said goodbye to Berlin with an almost sheepish grin.

  HOLLYWOOD

  Dietrich was sitting in her cabin, looking at the many bouquets of flowers from the premiere on the previous day and wondering whether they would still be fresh when she got to America. The Bremen had left Bremerhaven at 10 a.m. Resi, her dressing-room attendant, grew seasick, and then, to make matters worse, her dentures fell into the water. She staunchly refused to walk on deck with Dietrich. Not that anyone was interested in the actress—for most of the people on the ship, she was an attractive woman unaccompanied by a man. The passenger list indicates that she registered as “Marie Sieber-Dietrich, married, actress from Berlin,” and gave her age as twenty-five, thus making herself three years younger.1 Marie Sieber-Dietrich and her housekeeper Theresia Kunzmann were traveling as first-class passengers. In a photograph of her first time crossing the Atlantic, Dietrich is seated on her mountain of luggage, which consisted of several suitcases plus an array of bags bound with cords and wicker baskets. (Later she would always travel with monogrammed wardrobe trunks.) Sh
e is gazing intently into the camera in a tense pose. The huge luxury ship with eleven decks and four passenger classes frightened her. She spent most of her time in her cabin. The ballroom, library, swimming pool, and fashion salon on the ship held little interest for her. After months of demanding work under intense strain, Dietrich was exhausted. Suddenly no one was telling her what to do. The applause when she was standing onstage at the Gloria Palace was still ringing in her ears. Berlin was already in her past, and Hollywood was not yet her future.

  “Frau Dietrich, you are wanted at the telephone!” With these words, the adorable little page interrupted my reveries while I was lying on a comfortable deck chair. For the first time in my life, I got to use my knowledge of American slang when I replied: “Quit your kidding!” which means something along the lines of: Don’t make fun of me. “But madam, there is most certainly a telephone call for you!” . . . That was quite a sensation! Friends were calling me up to tell me about the great box office and critical success of my latest movie. I was beside myself with joy, because we had truly worked hard and were devoted body and soul. And the success was a fabulous reward, which greatly eased my understandable nervousness about my American debut and filled me with hope. Large numbers of radiograms came my way every day, as though it were necessary to keep my thoughts of Berlin alive.2

  Telegrams, sea voyages, telephone calls, solitude, doubts, and waiting would be part of Dietrich’s life from this point on. She would commute between Europe and America, at times with lovers at her side; she would visit her daughter Maria; and she would exchange letters and telegrams with her husband Rudi, but once the Bremen set sail on the morning of April 2, 1930, she would essentially always be alone to the end of her life. Now, too, she sat by herself in her cabin, hearing and reading about her triumph in faraway Berlin: “The event: Marlene Dietrich. Her singing and acting come across as almost detached, lethargic. But this sensual lethargy is arousing. She is crude in an unforced manner. Everything is film, and nothing is theater. For the first time, the audience could hear a woman’s voice in a sound film with timbre, tone quality, and expression. Extraordinary.”3 Even Heinrich Mann chimed in to the chorus of praise. Erich Pommer had brought a copy of The Blue Angel to him in Nice, and there he saw it for the first time. In an empty movie theater on the beach, he encountered the big-screen versions of the characters he had created in his novel.

  Marlene Dietrich is the physical embodiment of Lola Lola. . . . When she sings the famous refrain “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt . . . ” [the English-language version of which is “Falling in Love Again”] for the final time in the movie, she brings the philosophy of the work to the fore with a terrifying intensity. She embodies carnal love through and through with her bare sensuality, and she sings of her own destiny and that of the broken man who drags himself through snow-covered streets to his final place of refuge. I don’t think that an artist could possibly identify more strongly with the character the artist is portraying.4

  Josef von Sternberg had already been informed about the positive reception of the movie in Germany. It is difficult to say whether he cared, because in his autobiography he claimed to be relieved to have left Germany. “As the Bremen pushed itself away from the shores of Germany I watched the receding decks and turned to my assistant to say, ‘I’m glad that’s over. Let’s hope that nobody follows me.’ ”5 He most certainly hoped that Dietrich would follow him.

  Their next movie together was about the fate of a woman who follows the man she loves. Intentionally or not, Dietrich had given von Sternberg the book that would be adapted for her first American movie. In her usual considerate way, she gave him a basket with some travel materials before he left for America, which contained the 1927 novel Amy Jolly by Benno Vigny. Her view of the book was not very positive; she told von Sternberg it was “weak lemonade.”6 But he saw it as a promising gambit to feature Dietrich as a foreigner in her first American movie. He wanted the plot to be short on dialogue and long on images, because he was horrified by her German accent and felt strongly that “an image that had no accent, German or otherwise, could not be subjected to a guttural pronunciation.”7

  Jo would not meet up with Dietrich until she arrived in Los Angeles; she would have to take her first steps into the New World on her own. An extended period of bad weather delayed the arrival of the Bremen, but on the morning of April 9, the ship finally approached the New York harbor. Off in the distance, the skyscrapers came into view; the ship headed for the mouth of the Hudson and at long last came to the North German Lloyd pier in Brooklyn. Dietrich waited in her cabin for someone to pick her up. She had chosen a gray outfit for the morning of her arrival, just as her grandmother would have done, figuring that she could not go wrong with that. There was a knock at the door, and a well-dressed gentleman entered, who introduced himself as Mr. Blumenthal of Paramount Pictures. He had come to escort her ashore. Blumenthal looked her up and down with a critical eye and informed her with a charming smile that she could not leave the ship looking the way she did. She failed to grasp what he was getting at. Her stockings did not have any holes, her skirt was not too short, and her jacket was spotless. Blumenthal told her bluntly that in this outfit, the Americans would think she was a lesbian. He advised her to leave the ship in a black dress and a mink coat.8 Dietrich understood that it would be best to follow his advice. “As the ship moored and I stood in the morning sun in a black dress and a mink coat, I was both excited and fearful.”9 It dawned on her that a new chapter of her life was about to begin. However, there was no time to mull over this prospect. Blumenthal asked her to take a seat in the limousine that was waiting for her. They drove through long straight roads lined with high-rise buildings. He dropped her off at the elegant Hotel Ambassador, where the press conference would be taking place.

  That evening, Dietrich had an appointment with Walter Wanger, the vice president of Paramount, who would be showing her around New York along with his wife. When she arrived at the reception desk at the appointed hour, she saw a handsome man standing there who looked to be in his mid-thirties. He came up to her with a smile and kissed her hand. “My wife’s not feeling well,” he told her, “so we’ll have a tête-à-tête dinner.”10 Wanger was the great exception among the movie bigwigs. He spoke perfect German and French and was “college-educated, with excellent manners, liberal opinions, but evasive and ‘diplomatic.’ ”11 He brought Dietrich to a speakeasy, and she was fascinated to see how the guests reached under the table to pour themselves scotch or bourbon from the bottles they hid there. All of a sudden, Wanger whisked her onto the dance floor. She was so annoyed at his authoritarian behavior that she seized the first possible opportunity to make a quick exit. Her pride was wounded. Paramount had hired her as an actress, not an escort. When she got back to her hotel, she called Jo, who told her to leave New York the very next morning and not to talk to anyone. We may never know whether this account of her first night in New York is true, but it does say something about her feeling that Americans were phonies who put on a show of morality while reaching under the table for their whiskey; they masqueraded as gentlemen but left their wives at home and sought adventure elsewhere. The only person she could trust in this vast country was Josef von Sternberg.

  Hollywood was almost three thousand miles from New York. The fastest train took two nights and three days. Dietrich and Resi had to change trains several times; as they ate their tasteless meals, they wondered what they were doing in this country. Every time Dietrich woke up from a nap and looked out the window to see the unvarying view, she felt as though they had made no headway at all. Endless fields of grain alternated with small towns boasting a movie theater, a gas station, and a drugstore. There was not a single human being as far as the eye could see. Finally von Sternberg appeared on the platform like a mirage. As usual, he was dressed to the nines. “Now all was well—as always with him, he had ‘taken us over,’ ” she fondly recalled.12

  Jo had told her that on his first
visit to Hollywood he felt as though he was far from civilization. Hollywood was nothing but an empty village where the streets were lined with eucalyptus trees. Most of the studios were vacant. On occasion he would see a limousine bringing an actor to work. “I knew that there were famous stars in the community who lived in castles on the hills which surrounded their workshops. Hollywood Boulevard showed an occasional cowboy, but most of the time the sun shone on people who had migrated from Iowa, Kansas, and Minnesota.”13

  When Dietrich arrived in Los Angeles, she faced the traffic of a modern city with more than a million inhabitants roaring by. The warm climate, the lovely beaches, the scent of orange blossoms, and the vast expanse made this part of the world seem like paradise. Von Sternberg’s welcome present was a Rolls Royce and a chauffeur; he had instructed her not to drive. Paramount’s publicity photos show her next to this outsized Rolls Royce. She later noted on the back of one of these photos: “Wish I had it still.” Dietrich met with photographers and costume designers. She was homesick for Berlin and longed to see her daughter, but she reveled in von Sternberg’s unconditional love. His wife Riza filed a complaint against Dietrich, blaming Dietrich for her marital estrangement, but he refused to let anything distract him from his goal of making a motion picture that would live up to the high standards he had set for himself, bring in a great deal of money for Paramount, and make an utterly unknown German woman the new star of Hollywood. He chose two utterly dissimilar men to costar with her: Adolphe Menjou, a well-known silent film actor who had acted with Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Gary Cooper to play Menjou’s rival.14 Cooper’s prior roles had portrayed him as the good, honest, handsome American cowboy. But von Sternberg had something else in mind for him.